The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [320]
the end of the war," I said. "Is that so? What doing?" "I'm connected in business with that Armenian lawyer you met at my wedding. Remember?" "Oh, of course, you're married. Is your wife here with you?" "Naturally. She works in pictures. Maybe you've seen her in Les Orphelines. It's about displaced persons." "No, as a matter of fact I don't see many movies. But I'm not surprised to hear she's an actress. She's very beautiful, you know. How are things working out?" "I love her," I said. As if that was an answer! But how can you blame me if I was unwilling to say more to Frazer? Suppose I started to explain that she loved me too, but loved me in the same way that Paris is the City of Man, or with what she brought to it, given her preoccupations--love being the victory of love over preoccupations, or what Mintouchian called dominant ideas that afternoon in the Turkish bath. I wasn't going to go into all this with Frazer. When I took it up with Stella, and once in a while I did, or tried to, I seemed to sound like a fanatic, and maybe sounded to her as other people had to me, sounding of! about their idea that they were trying to sell or to recruit you for. This made her a mirror, like, where I could see my own obstinacy of yore and how it must have looked when I balked. She was right when we took cover in the garden of the Japanese villa in Acatia and she observed that we were very similar. So we are. However, even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average. Stella does. Of course you can call it lying or you can call it protection of your vision. I think I prefer the second description. Stella looks happy and firm and wants me to look the same. She sits down by the bird-breasted stove in the salon, on the chair the old English gent Ryehurst warned me--having damages in mind--was a genuine Chippendale, and she's calm, intelligent, forceful, vital, tremendously handsome, and this is how she wants to put herself across. It's the vision. Naturally it often takes me a while to know where we're really at. She talks about happenings at the studio and laughs with her clear, bosomy voice about the jokes of the day. And what have I been doing? Well, perhaps I had a meeting with a person who used to be in Dachau and did some business with him in dental supplies from Germany. That took an hour or two. After which I may have gone to the cold halls of the Louvre and visited in the Dutch School, or noticed how the Seine smelled like medicine, or went into a cafe and wrote a letter, and so passed the day. She sits and listens with crossed legs under the batik house-wrap she wears, with her heavy three-way-piled hair and cigarette at her mouth and refuses me--for the time being, anyway--the most important things I ask of her. It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, and from the bath she called out to me, "Darling, please bring me a towel." I took one of those towel robes that I had bought at the Bon Marche department store and came along with it. The little bathroom was in twilight. In the chauffe-eau machine, the brass box with teeth of gas burning, the green metal dropped crumbs inside from the thousand-candle blaze. Her body with its warm woman's smell was covered with water starting in a calm line over her breasts. The glass of the medicine chest shone like a deep blue place in the wall, as if a window to the evening sea and not the ashy fog of Paris. I sat down with the robe over my shoulder and felt very much at peace. For a change the apartment seemed clean and was warm; the abominations were gone into the background, the stoves drew well and they shone. Jacqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought